Chemal

The monk was feeding chickens when I arrived at the footbridge leading to Patmos Island. He was a large, unhurried man with a black beard and rubber boots, entirely unbothered by the cluster of tourists negotiating the swaying rope bridge behind me. The chickens were interested in the tourists. He was interested in the chickens. I waited until he’d finished, and when he turned and noticed me he gave a nod that seemed to mean both welcome and don’t dawdle, and went back inside.

Patmos Island is a granite outcrop in the middle of the Katun River, a few hundred metres from the village of Chemal, connected to the bank by a narrow suspension footbridge that sways disconcertingly in the wind. On the island stands the Church of Saint John the Theologian — built in 1849, destroyed by Soviet decree in 1920, rebuilt by a local artist starting in 1989 and completed in 1993. The church is small and white and surrounded by pines that cling to the rock with the tenacity of things that understand they have no alternative. Below it, the Katun rushes between boulders with a sound that you feel as much as hear.

Chemal itself is the closest thing the Russian Altai has to a resort town, which is not very close. There are sanatoriums from the Soviet era, repurposed now as guesthouses offering “kurort therapy” — the mineral waters and pine-scented air that Soviet medicine prescribed for everything from tuberculosis to stress. The main street has a row of stalls selling honey and pine-nut products: jars of pine-nut oil, bags of raw kernels, tinctures in brown bottles. I bought a jar of pine-nut honey — a local specialty where the comb sits in a base of pale amber honey with a taste so specific and strange, faintly resinous, sweet in a way that has an edge to it — and ate most of it over two days with bread from the bakery in the village’s only grocery store.

The Katun below the village becomes accessible on foot, and I spent an afternoon on the gravel bars watching the river negotiate the curves with what looked like deliberate intelligence. The water really is that colour: a blue-green so vivid that the eye keeps recalibrating, keeps waiting for it to resolve into something more plausible. Families swam in the calmer sections, shouting at the cold. Old men sat on the rocks with lines in the water, not catching much. A goat appeared on the far bank and stood there for a while, apparently regarding the tourist situation, then walked back into the pines.

The hydroelectric dam at the edge of town — a Soviet-era structure that controls flow into a reservoir — is not what you’d come to see, but the view from its walkway across the reservoir toward the encircling mountains on a clear morning is a genuinely remarkable piece of accidental composition. Nobody else was there. I had the mountains and the water and the silence entirely to myself for about twenty minutes, which felt like a kind of gift that Chemal hands out when you stop looking for the monastery.

When to go: June through September. July and August are the busiest months, when the sanatoriums fill and families come for the water. Late June and September offer the same landscape with considerably fewer people and much better light for photography.